Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

The aim of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig is to investigate human cognitive abilities and brain processes. The main focus of the research is on the neuronal basis of higher functions of the brain such as speech, music, and action. To this end, the scientists’ primary interest focuses on how these are perceived, processed, planned, and generated, as well as how perception and generation influence each other. They also investigate the plastic changes to the brain after strokes, and how these affect different cognitive abilities. The Department of Neurophysics, which was established in early 2007, is specifically concerned with the use and development of imaging methods for the neurosciences.

Thomas Fritz, Leader of the Music Evoked Brain Plasticity Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, knows how to make people happy and fearless - essentially as a kind of welcome side-effect. He conducts experiments using exercise machines with which you can create music. The experience of exercising with this equipment and simultaneously creating unique sounds not only reduces bodily exhaustion, it also puts the user in a good mood and lowers their anxiety and pain levels - effects that give rise to a range of therapeutic applications.

From a very early age, children exhibit an amazing sense of fairness and justice. The older they get, the more compassion and empathy they develop. Nikolaus Steinbeis from Tania Singer’s department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig is studying how the social behavior of children changes as they get older, and which of the brain’s networks play a role in this.

Not many Max Planck institutes can claim to have a fitness room – and that for research purposes, no less. But Arno Villringer at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig isn’t interested in hardening muscles. He wants to use the training equipment to study how training motion sequences changes the brain.

When people work together, they have to coordinate their actions very closely. Wolfgang Prinz, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, and his colleagues are investigating precisely what goes on in their heads in the process.

Snakes and spiders evoke fear and disgust in many people. Even in developed countries lots of people are frightened of these animals although hardly anybody comes into contact with them. Until now, there has been debate about whether this aversion is innate or learnt. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and the Uppsala University have recently discovered that it is hereditary: babies as young as six months feel stressed when seeing these creatures – long before they could have learnt this reaction.

Our sense of well-being is linked to our hormones. Nearly twice as many women as men develop depressive illness. While this suggests that sex hormones play a key role in depression, it is not understood how they affect mood. Very little is known about how the brain is influenced by endogenous hormonal changes across the range of days to months. This is a critical gap, because many mental illnesses show large fluctuations over this timescale. Recent evidence suggests short-term changes in neurochemistry and functional and structural networks modulated by physiological sex-hormone fluctuation.

The timing of developmental trajectories in language acquisition is paradoxical. Some milestones are reached very rapidly. For example, embryos are able to discriminate vowels already in utero [1]. Other milestones, however, like understanding grammatically complex sentences, are not even reached at the primary school age. What is the reason for this? Current neurobiological findings suggest that a brain network involved in processing grammatical information has to reach an adult-level maturity until it can provide its full function.

Speech is more than only words: The vocal tone – the prosody – often reveals more about the speaker’s communicative intention than the words themselves. While the neural networks of the left hemisphere, that decode the words, are already well-known, the description of the networks for prosody perception is comparably sparse. In this description of a project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, the importance of white matter tracts in the right hemisphere will be shown and that also the motor system joins in when it comes to prosody perception.

In the course of child development one can observe an enormous wealth of significant changes in social behaviour. While initially selfish and impulsive behaviour may be dominant, prosociality increases with age. Until recently, the associated changes occurring in the brain were unknown. We now know, however, that the maturation of brain regions responsible for exerting behavioural control enables older children to do the right thing at the right time and override more immediate selfish impulses.